The Trump administration has finally clarified its stance on Syria—it plans to occupy portions of the country and remove its elected leader, Bashar al-Assad.

The former reason is, of course, predicated on the phony Islamic State threat, while the latter is based on the threadbare excuse the United States must prevent al-Assad from butchering his own people and, after all, Syrians deserve democracy American-style, even if the price is 500,000 dead men, women, and children.

“But let us be clear, the United States will maintain a military presence in Syria, focused on ensuring ISIS cannot re-emerge,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared on January 17 during a speech at Stanford University. He was accompanied by former Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice.

Tillerson promised free and transparent elections “will result in the permanent departure of Assad and his family from power. This process will take time, and we urge patience in the departure of Assad and the establishment of new leadership.”

However, in 2015, a poll conducted by ORB International with the backing of the United States and Britain found that Bashar al-Assad has more support in the country than the CIA cobbled together “moderate” opposition.

Moreover, Syrians look more favorably on Iran than the Gulf States, which are largely responsible, along with the United States, for supporting al-Qaeda and its affiliates and spinoffs, including al-Nusra (now a component of Tahrir al-Sham) and the Islamic State.

According to Tillerson, “responsible change” will arrive as an “incremental process of constitutional reform and UN-supervised elections.”

Mr. Tillerson, however, is ignoring the failure of the so-called “Geneva process” designed to establish a transitional government in Syria. It is opposed by Salafi groups fighting to overthrow al-Assad. These groups wish to impose strict Sharia law across Syria, while others propose splitting the country up along ethnic and religious lines.

This last “solution” is opposed by a majority of Syrians who want, according to Western polling, a multi-ethnic and non-sectarian democracy. 70% oppose a forced division of the country. [READ MORE]

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On January 11 during a meeting on immigration, President Trump asked why America accepts immigrants from “shithole countries.” His remark was aimed at Haiti and Africa.

Although the remark resulted in widespread condemnation and a denial from the administration, Trump was correct about the conditions in Haiti and Africa despite the crudity of his commentary.

Left out of the discussion, however, are the reasons for deplorable conditions in these countries.

After Christopher Columbus “discovered” in 1492 what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the island began its descent into misery. His sailors carried endemic Eurasian infectious diseases that wiped out thousands of natives.

The Taíno natives were generous and this led to their ultimate downfall and near extinction at the hands of the Spanish. Columbus said they would make good servants. Instead of servants, they became slaves under the encomienda system of forced labor in gold mines and plantations. By 1512, Spain codified a set of laws governing the behavior of Spaniards toward indigenous people in the Americas and endorsed their conversion to Catholicism.

A century later, the French imported slaves from Africa to work on sugarcane plantations. In Saint-Domingue, formerly Spain’s Santo Domingo, the French established a particularly brutal slave colony. One third of the slaves brought from Africa died within the first year from overwork and diseases such as smallpox and typhoid fever. By 1788, Haiti's population consisted of 25,000 whites, 22,000 free “coloreds” and 700,000 slaves.

Following the example of the French Revolution in 1789, “free people of color” in Saint-Domingue and the French West Indies demanded more civil liberties. These unfulfilled demands by self-liberated slaves resulted in a widespread revolt against the Spanish and French. This revolt—the largest slave uprising since Spartacus led an unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years before—led to the end of slavery in the colony.

The slave revolt forged a two-caste society in Haiti. Many of the wealthier mixed-race Haitians identified with the French and class division and tension resulted.

In 1825, the French forced the new state to pay reparations to ex-slave owners in return for recognition and the end of the island’s economic and political isolation. Although the amount of reparations—initially 150 million gold francs—was reduced in 1838, Haiti wasn’t able to pay off this debt until 1947. Reparations left the country impoverished and divided, a situation that has lasted until this day. It remains the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Haiti soon became a target for global predatory lenders, most notably the International Monetary Fund. Its debt has grown exponentially since, from $302 million in 1980 to $1.134 billion in 2004. [READ MORE]

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On January 4, the Trump administration announced it will suspend military aid to Pakistan. According to State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, the government of Pakistan has not taken “decisive action” against the Taliban and the so-called Haqqani Network.

Additionally, the US placed Pakistan on a “Special Watch List” for “severe violations of religious freedom.”

On January 6, the Trump administration announced “all options are on the table” to deal with Pakistan, including siccing globalist organizations on the recalcitrant nation, including the IMF and United Nations.

The move reeks of hypocrisy. Not discussed is the fact the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) collaborated on the formation of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The Carter and Reagan administrations are largely responsible for funding, arming, and training the Afghan Mujahideen in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Forgotten is the role both agencies played in marshaling tens of thousands of radical Islamic fighters between 1985 and 1992 in Afghanistan.

“The CIA’s covert action in Pakistan and Afghanistan was the largest in the organization’s history since World War II,” Michael R. Szymanski writes for the Journal of the Indiana Academy of the Social Science. “By creating a monster in Afghanistan and throughout the Islamic fundamentalist world, the United States is now unable to regulate its actions.”

Regulation, however, is not required if the goal is “creative destruction” and the formation of an “Arc of Crisis,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski called the engineered social, religious, and political upheavals in “nations that stretch across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey, and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa.”

In 1979, the locus of this subversive plan began in Afghanistan, not only to undermine the Soviet Union, but also to seed a fundamentalist and violent Islamic movement across the region.

“For generations in both Afghanistan and the Soviet Muslim Republics the dominant form of Islam had been local and largely Sufi,” writes Peter Dale Scott. “The decision to work with the Saudi and Pakistani secret services meant that billions of CIA and Saudi dollars would ultimately be spent in programs that would help enhance the globalistic and Wahhabistic jihadism that are associated today with al Qaeda.”

According to Selig Harrison, an expert on US relations with Asia, the CIA and its ISI partner “actively encouraged” the formation of the Taliban. “The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban,” adds author Ahmed Rashid. [READ MORE]*If you are a Newsbud Community Member, you must log in to view full content.

Over the last few days, anti-government protests have broken out across Iran. It’s reported the protests are focused on deteriorating economic conditions and corruption in the Islamic Republic. Demonstrators have gathered in a number of cities, including Tehran, the holy city of Qom, Isfahan, Kermanshah, Rasht, Sari, and Hamedan.

While average Iranians undoubtedly suffer as a result of the policies and actions of a highly centralized religious government, we must ask if the latest round of anti-government activity is part of a foreign effort to destabilize the country by exploiting discontent with the country’s leadership.

In June, we learned that the Trump administration is behind an effort by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to topple the government in Tehran. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Trump administration includes a number of hardliners on Iran, most notably Defense Secretary James Mattis, National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, and Trump’s CIA director, Mike Pompeo.

Prior to his appointment, Pompeo called for military attacks on Iran’s civilian nuclear program. He also said “Congress must act to change Iranian behavior, and, ultimately, the Iranian regime.”

Additionally, he told Iranian Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani in a letter that the United States will hold Iran responsible for attacks on US interest in Iraq regardless of the source.

In June, Michael D’Andrea—a CIA officer known as the Dark Prince or Ayatollah Mike (for his conversion to Islam)—was appointed to run the agency’s Iran operations. He supposedly headed up the effort to capture Osama bin Laden, the former CIA groomed leader of al-Qaeda who died in Afghanistan back in December, 2001.

D’Andrea was involved in the use of torture during interrogations of suspected terrorists during the Bush administration. He also played a key role in the assassination of Imad Mugniyah, the international operations chief for Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah. The assassination was carried out with assistance from Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.

Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Trump’s former Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the NSC (he was ousted in January, reportedly by McMaster), told the administration he wanted to use covert activities to take down the government in Tehran.

The Saudi effort includes riling up dissident groups in Balochistan that cross over the border into the Iranian province of Sistan and carry out operations. For instance, in October 2009, Jundullah, a Balochi resistance group with alleged links to Al-Qaeda, launched a suicide bomb attack that killed a number of Iranian Revolutionary Guards on a bus in the city of Zahedan. Jundullah has also captured Iranian soldiers and border guards and executed them. [READ MORE]

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In late November, the Atlantic Council, established as a NATO cheering section in 1961, applauded the National Security Council for its decision to send more weapons to the Poroshenko government in Ukraine.

On November 18 it was reported President Trump would consider a plan “to counter Russian aggression in the region.” The NCS plan includes a $47 million grant package that would supply Ukraine with high-tech weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles.

A little more than a month later, on December 22, the Trump administration officially announced a plan to provide the Kiev government with “lethal weapons,” including the Javelin.

At the State Department, Heather Nauert said the Trump administration had decided to provide “enhanced defensive capabilities" to help Ukraine build its military, defend its sovereignty, and “deter further aggression.”

This “aggression” includes status referendums held in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the Donbass region in 2014. Although the Poroshenko government tried to disrupt the vote, participation was high and the people of Donbass voted overwhelmingly to leave Ukraine.

The vote was portrayed by the establishment media in the West as Russian interference and an attempt to undermine the sovereignty of Ukraine.

However, if this was the case, Russia would have immediately recognized the breakaway republics. It didn’t do this. Instead, as was the case in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008, it refrained. [READ MORE]

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President Donald Trump is courting bad company. He’s talking with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, ex-CIA officer John R. Maguire, and Iran-Contra figure Oliver North in a bid to create his own private version of the Central Intelligence Agency. A proposal has been submitted to the current CIA boss, Mike Pompeo, The Week reported on December 5.

It’s part of an effort to circumvent current and former members of the intelligence community that are working to undermine the president.

“Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him,” a former senior intelligence official told Matthew Cole of The Intercept. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books.”

One glance at the players and we can determine what the outcome will be if the effort gets off the ground.

Erik Prince currently heads the private equity firm Frontier Resource Group and is chairman of Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group Ltd. Prince worked with Trump’s transition team and shares the president’s view on Islam. [READ MORE]

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Having failed to unseat Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the United States has switched its focus to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In an act of blatant hypocrisy, the US House has passed “Sanctioning Hezbollah’s Illicit use of Civilians as Defenseless Shields Act,” a bill that sanctions Hezbollah for alleged war crimes while ignoring its own checkered past brimming with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This is a remarkable allegation considering Israel specifically and indiscriminately targeted Lebanon’s civilian population. “Israel’s indiscriminate airstrikes, not Hezbollah’s shielding as claimed by Israeli officials, caused most of the approximately 900 civilian deaths in Lebanon during the July-August 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah,” Human Rights Watch reported in September, 2007. [READ MORE]

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There are several unanswered questions about the terror attack in Manhattan on October 31, allegedly by Sayfullo Saipov, a Uzbek immigrant. Most prominent is a report by a neighbor in Patterson, New Jersey, who said he saw Saipov in the company of two identified men.

“They didn’t look like construction workers. They weren’t dressed like they were going to work,” Carlos Batista told Fox News. “I would see him with them more than his own kids.”

Like the mysterious woman reportedly seen with accused Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, the two individuals spotted with Saipov will never be identified and the corporate media will dismiss Batista’s story as irrelevant, if they acknowledge it at all. The lone wolf inspired and radicalized by Islamic State videos is now the official narrative. [READ MORE]

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CIA Director Mike Pompeo told an interviewer at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) the CIA will “become a much more vicious agency” in conducting covert operations against its roster of enemies, most prominently Iran and North Korea.

Pompeo also told the gathering of neocons Trump decertified the Iran deal not because it is in violation—the Iranians are playing by the rules—but rather because Trump has been told it “would curtail Iranian adventurism.”

Trump advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, also addressed the FDD neocons. He said America has suffered from a lack of “strategic competence… in recent years,” in other words, the deep state has failed to remove the governments of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and assorted others.

Foreign Policy columnist Jeffrey Lewis compared McMaster’s remarks to those of General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Taylor urged President Kennedy to launch an invasion of Cuba.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies is a cross-pollination of neocons and humanitarian interventionists. Its board of advisors includes Weekly Standard publisher Bill Kristol, former CIA boss James Woolsey, radical fringe neocon Frank Gaffney, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, and assorted deep state insiders, namely Newt Gingrich, Joe Lieberman, Donna Brazile (the former DNC boss is a founding member), and Charles Schumer.

The organization is funded by the Bronfman brothers, Clifford D. May, and assorted millionaires and billionaires. May is president of the foundation and a signatory of the Project for the New American Century, noted for its preoccupation with Iraq and the chimera of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear and chemical programs. It was founded by two neocons, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, and is responsible for many of the lies used to make a case for invading Iraq. [READ MORE]

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After candidate Donald Trump sojourned to the New York home of Henry Kissinger last May, it was obvious his rhetoric about draining the swamp was little more than a disingenuous advertising slogan. Kissinger sits near the top of the globalist totem, revered as an elder statesman by the political class.

On October 10, President Trump met with Kissinger in the Oval Office, reportedly to discuss North Korea. During a photo op Trump said the former secretary of state is a “man of immense, talent, experience and knowledge.”

“Henry Kissinger has been a friend of mine,” Trump added, sitting beside the nonagenarian. “I’ve liked him. I’ve respected him. But we've been friends for a long time, long before my emergence into the world of politics, which has not been too long.”

In other words, Donald Trump admires the crimes of Henry Kissinger. However, considering Trump’s dubious comprehension of politics and history, it is entirely possible he only vaguely understands Kissinger conspired to commit murder and was the driving force behind acts defined as war crimes, most notoriously murdering millions of people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Despite previous criticism of interventionism and nation-building, Trump considers elements of Kissinger’s version of realpolitik useful for his foreign policy agenda.

One can’t get more globalist than the Rockefellers, and Kissinger served the clan as a trusted consigliere for a decade. Kissinger has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1956 and served as a member of its Board of Directors from 1977 to 1981. The CFR was established in 1921 by Col. Edward Mandell House, chief adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, and was financed by John D. Rockefeller along with J.P. Morgan and other bankers. Kissinger is also a regular fixture at annual Bilderberg meetings established by Prince Bernhard, the consort of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. His colorful past includes a stint as a member of Reiter-SS, a mounted unit of the Nazi SS. [READ MORE]

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Byman’s point of departure is Stephen Paddock, the millionaire accused of killing 58 people attending and country and western festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. The government has yet to establish a political or religious motive for the attack, and yet Byman writes Paddock fits “a stereotype of a right-wing terrorist more than a jihadist one.”

From there Byman conflates Paddock’s alleged violence with that of James Alex Fields Jr., the “white supremacist” who drove a car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville. “Fields’ use of a car to drive through a crowd resembles nothing more than the vehicle attacks that we’ve seen in Barcelona, Berlin, London, Nice, and other cities in the past two years,” Byman argues.

From there Byman wanders far afield. He pairs the 2015 attack on a Planned Parenthood Clinic and a black church in Charleston to the sniper attack in Las Vegas. He argues the government should treat domestic terrorism incidents the same way it treats attacks by the Islamic State. [READ MORE]

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In response to President Donald Trump’s threats to intervene militarily in Venezuela, the oil-rich country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, has told his military to prepare for an attack by the United States.

"We have been shamelessly threatened by the most criminal empire that ever existed and we have the obligation to prepare ourselves to guarantee peace," Maduro said on September 27 during military exercises in the city of Maracay. He added that “we need to have rifles, missiles and well-oiled tanks at the ready... to defend every inch of the territory if needs be.”

Maduro made the remark after Trump signed a travel ban decree imposed on eight countries he insists pose a security threat to the United States. In August, the president banned US financial institutions from doing business with Venezuela and its Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil and natural gas company. Oil reserves in Venezuela are the largest in the world. [READ MORE]

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Catalans are drawing comparisons to the brutal rule of El caudillo, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, after the Spanish central government began its crackdown on a planned referendum for Catalonia independence.

Offices were raided and members of the Catalan government arrested on September 20 by Spain's Guardia Civil police as part of an effort to derail an independence vote scheduled for October 1. Madrid ruled the referendum illegal and imposed a ban. Police seized ballots and documents related to the referendum and later took over the payment of essential services and public workers' salaries to prevent Catalonia from spending money. The Spanish government also ordered banks to control all movements in the accounts and credit cards managed by Catalan leaders.

On September 22, the Spanish Interior Ministry chartered three ferries to house police in preparation for a crackdown.

"Three ships arrived and will stay in the ports of Barcelona and Tarragona, where police and Guardia Civil forces will stay," said the central government's representative office in Catalonia.

According to a spokesman for the port in Barcelona, the police, said to number over 16,000, will stay until October 3, two days after the scheduled referendum vote. A recent Guardia Civil tweet described the presence of its officers in Catalonia as “La tormenta,” or the storm. The Guardia Civil operation is dubbed Anubis, named after the Egyptian god of death.

The president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, told the Guardian that even during the worst of ETA era the government did not deploy massive numbers of police. ETA, an acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or "Basque Homeland and Liberty,” was a formerly armed leftist Basque nationalist and separatist organization in the Basque Country in northern Spain and southwestern France.

“How would people in the UK feel if ferries stuffed with police officers suddenly turned up where they live? Or if they saw police vans all over the motorway and paramilitary police—like the Guardia Civil—raiding newspaper offices or government buildings or private homes and arresting people as if they were dealing with terrorists?” Puigdemont told the newspaper.

The repressive tactics of the Spanish government are reminiscent of the Franco era. After Franco defeated the democratically elected Spanish Republic and staged a military coup with the assistance of Hitler and Mussolini, Catalans experienced the annulment of the Statute of Autonomy—gained in 1932—and the curtailment of civil liberties, the banning of Catalan institutions, the prohibition and persecution of political parties, and censorship. [READ MORE]

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President Donald Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his director of National Intelligence Dan Coats sent a letter on September 7 to the leaders of the House and Senate demanding Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) be made permanent. The act faces a sunset provision later this year. Under Section 702, the government is allowed to circumvent the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and obtain general warrants issued by the secret FISA court. Proceedings before the FISA court are ex parte—in other words, the government is the only party present—and non-adversarial.

According to senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, the federal government relies on "secret legal interpretations" to claim all-encompassing surveillance powers. The secret court permits interception of electronic communications of unidentified targets anywhere in the United States. Moreover, there are no real limits on how the government uses, retains, or disseminates the information that it collects. “This means the government can create huge databases that contain information about U.S. persons obtained without warrants and then search these databases at a later point,” the American Civil Liberties Union notes.

Sessions and Coats argue the law is limited to the collection of “vital information about international terrorists, cyber actors, individuals and entities engaged in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other important foreign intelligence targets located outside the United States.”

In fact, the government has used the law to surveil political activists in the United States, activists that have nothing to do with terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. [READ MORE]

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On September 5, AFRICOM and Somali government troops conducted an airstrike on the Islamic group al-Shabaab in the Bay area in the southern part of the country. The Pentagon said it killed three terrorists. According to the Somali government, an earlier AFRICOM raid in the village of Bariire killed ten men and boys. It is yet unknown if the latest raid killed civilians.

Although Donald Trump promised to reduce US military interventionism abroad and said he eschews nation building, in April he authorized the deployment of troops to the embattled Horn of African nation, the first time since 1994.

Trump claims the policies of the Obama administration prevented the Pentagon from defeating al-Shabaab. This is clearly not the case. Barack Obama continued the policy of his predecessor in Africa. He authorized bombing operations, drone attacks, funding and training of the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), maintenance of a CIA field station in Mogadishu, and positioning of warships in the Gulf of Aden. [READ MORE]

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